It seems Microsoft's Bing is teaming up with Baidu, China's largest search engine. Baidu is largely a Chinese language search engine and Bing will help them improve their English based searches. This comes after Google pulled out of China over concerns of censorship. The article says that the new Bing searches will be also censored and this made me think of the display ads and marketing. It's probably going to be even harder to introduce customized advertising content when you have to be careful of who you are targeting and what material you are providing them with.
The full article is available here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/05/technology/05microsoft.html?_r=1&ref=technology
1 comment:
I am also wondering if this cooperation will be successful or not in China. It seems like a win-win situation for both parties. It's a great opportunity for Microsoft to introduce Bing to Chinese users while Baidu can solidify its dominant position as China No.1 Search engine.
However, I think it would be very challenging. In China, majority of users search in Chinese. The target group for English Searching users will be mainly college students and the white-collar in Tier 1 cities, which is a minority group considering the large population in China. Most of them are used to using Baidu to search in Chinese while using google to search for English materials. Therefore, I am very curious about how Baidu will market its English based search engine considering the existing mindset of Chinese users.
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